Apr 11th 2013

Mitigating Distrust Is Central To Peace

by Alon Ben-Meir

 

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

A critical impediment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the complete distrust between the two sides. What makes the conflict even more intractable is that neither side is convinced that distrusting the other can be mitigated given the history of the conflict, their opposing goals and day-to-day experiences, reinforced by the constant maligning of each other through their public narratives.

This leads to an ever-diminishing prospect for reconciliation which inhibits concessions and drives both sides to resort to a zero-sum negotiating posture. Moreover, due to their respective public sentiments (hate and animosity toward the other), pessimism and resistance to change continue to prevail.

As a result, they refuse to show flexibility and in so doing, distrust becomes further ingrained intellectually and emotionally, creating a vicious cycle which defies reason and reality.

It is clear that if the Israelis and the Palestinians hold fast to their positions, it will be nearly impossible to allay distrust, leading to a continuing deadlock because distrust cannot be negotiated by simply agreeing to establish a new trusting relationship.

Given the embedded distrust, even if the two parties negotiate and reach an agreement, such as the 1993-1994 Oslo Accords, there is still no assurance that such agreements will endure, as has been demonstrated.

But since Israeli-Palestinian coexistence is an unadulterated fact, any agreement reached must be based on certain provisions, mechanisms, logistics, and a timeline designed to ensure compliance based on reciprocity that would nurture trust.

The claims and counter-claims, especially by Israeli officials, that distrust prevents them from reaching an agreement is gravely counterproductive because neither side can coexist as enemies indefinitely, but also because distrust cannot be mitigated in a vacuum.

Trust can be nurtured if both sides negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement. The prospect for an agreement however, can be dramatically improved by agreeing on developing close socio-economic relations, the fulfillment of which can foster trust.

For example, in 2000 and 2008-2009, the Israelis and the Palestinians were able to reach an agreement in principle on many contentious issues, including the future of Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees. At close scrutiny, however, we find that at play were biased and selective perceptions nurtured by distrust over each other’s intentions to deliver.

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 provides a classic case from Israel’s perspective and was viewed as a major move to demonstrate its intentions to end the occupation, but ultimately it failed to achieve its “presumed objective.”

Instead of turning a free Gaza into a prosperous area, after wrestling the strip from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas used Gaza as a staging ground for launching thousands of rockets into Israel. This was a clear manifestation that the Palestinians simply do not want peace and cannot be trusted, a belief that most Israelis share to this day.

As a result, Israel was discouraged from further evacuation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, believing that the Palestinians would still seek the destruction of the state as Hamas repeatedly enunciates, especially when such protestations are taken at face value.

From the Palestinians’ perspective, however, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was a tactical move. They insist that Israel simply wanted to rid itself from occupying a densely populated area of Palestinians, which has no strategic value and was prohibitively costly to maintain.

The Palestinians further argue that Israel has no intentions of vacating other occupied territories in the West Bank. From their vantage point there is no reason to trust Netanyahu’s government, which claims to support the two-state solution yet continues to build settlements.

The question is, had the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza been done differently, would the outcome have been any different, or at a minimum, vindicated or repudiated the narrative of distrust by either side? My answer is absolutely yes.

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was precipitous and unilateral with no coordination with the PA, it entailed no phased withdrawal, no new security arrangements, and did not assess Hamas’ power and specific reciprocal moves on the part of the Palestinians. Moreover, there was no agreement on trade and commercial ties to foster human-to-human relations that engender trust.

Thus, it can be argued that had then-Prime Minister Sharon reached an agreement with the PA about every aspect of the withdrawal, it could have nurtured trust between the two sides rather than further aggravating the situation.

Surely, both sides would have known full well that any violation of the specific agreed-upon arrangements would stop the process in place, an action from which neither side could benefit.

It should be recalled that it took three years for Israel to complete its withdrawal from the Sinai, while taking reciprocal measures to enhance security and develop closer ties with the Egyptiangovernment. Had Israel followed the same pattern, it would be safe to assume that Hamas might not have been able to overthrow the PA in Gaza or win the elections in 2006.

Indeed, the Israeli withdraw from Gaza should have lasted long enough to allow the PA to establish its own security apparatus, engage in economic developments with Israel, and develop a vested interest while enacting confidence-building measures between the two sides.

The same can be said about Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon by former Prime Minister Barak under cover of night without any agreement with the Lebanese government, which could have changed the sequence of events that led to the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Obviously, trust cannot be fostered in an environment of hostility and mutual recrimination. However, distrust is not set in stone; it can and should be alleviated, especially under the circumstances that govern the lives of Israelis and Palestinians.

Israel must now learn from its experience with Egypt verses Gaza and Lebanon and apply these lessons to the West Bank. The Israeli argument against withdrawal citing national security concerns is invalid not only because the acquisition of more territory in the West Bank would not enhance Israel’s security but because there are available means by which to nurture mutual trust.

Israel should develop a plan that would allow the PA to develop infrastructure and commerce while attracting investments especially in Area C, which is completely controlled by Israel, as wasrequested by the PA President Abbas from Secretary of State John Kerry who has just visited Israel and Palestine. In addition, Israel should allow gradual tourism between the two sides, encourage trade, begin the systematic release of Palestinian prisoners, and ease Palestinian mobility while curtailing the expansion of settlements.

Any withdrawal from the West Bank should extend over a period of several years and such phases should be based on reciprocal measures taken by the PA while continuing and further enhancing security cooperation to foster trust. The PA has demonstrated that it has the ability to meet its commitments on security matters, to which many Israeli officials attest.

In the final analysis, guided by the imperative of coexistence, genuine efforts can be made to mitigate distrust, which is the only way both can build trust and test each other real commitment to reach a lasting peace agreement.

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Putin's Brezhnev Moment 
by Aryeh Neier
Feb 6th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Brezhnev, in power from 1964 to 1982, signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, together with the United States, Canada, and most of Europe. Eager for formal recognition of its borders at the time, the USSR under Brezhnev, together with its satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe, underestimated the potential impact of the Accords. That is probably why it agreed to include commitments to respect human rights, including freedom of information and movement, in the agreement’s Final Act." --- "Putin’s regime is turning its back on the legacy of Soviet dissent. Worse, it is replicating the despotic practices of Brezhnev and Soviet totalitarianism. If it continues on this path, it risks ending up in the same place."
The Necessity of Morality in Foreign Policy
by Chris Patten
Feb 5th 2023
EXTRACT: "....when countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and, above all, China flagrantly violate their citizens’ human rights, liberal democracies must unite to constrain their behavior. Ultimately, it is up to those of us who believe in the universality of human rights to expose crimes against humanity and to uphold liberal-democratic values in the face of authoritarian threats" --- "....liberal democracies have a shared responsibility to support the Ukrainians fighting to defend their homeland and to protect their rights to self-determination and statehood in the face of Russian aggression."
Ukraine war: the bloody battle for Soledar and what it tells us about the future of the conflict
by Stefan Wolff
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "On balance, then, the events in and around Soledar over the past week illustrate that no matter the outcome of the current fighting, this is not a turning point. It’s another strong indication that the war is likely going to be long and costly."
Through the Russian Looking Glass 
by Michael Marder
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Russian President Vladimir Putin has long regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” The invasion of Ukraine, now approaching its one-year anniversary, could be seen as the culmination of his years-long quest to restore the Soviet empire. ..... "With Russia’s economy straining under Western sanctions, some of the country’s leading economists and mathematicians are advocating a return to the days of five-year plans and quantitative production targets." .... "The logical endpoint of a planned economy today is the same as it was then: mass expropriation. Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to millions of deaths, and the post-communist 'shock therapy' of privatization resulted in the proliferation of 'raiders' and the creation of a new class of oligarchs. Now, enthralled by imperial nostalgia, Russia may be about to embark on a new violent wave of expropriation and redistribution."
China's Autocracy in Crisis 
by Ian Buruma
Jan 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "These developments suggest that Indian economist Amartya Sen was correct when he famously argued in 1983 that famines are caused not only by a shortage of food but also by a lack of information and political accountability. For example, the Bengal famine of 1943, India’s worst, happened under imperial British rule. After India gained independence, the country’s free press and democratic government, while flawed, prevented similar catastrophes. Sen’s thesis has since been hailed as a ringing endorsement of democracy. While some critics have noted that elected governments can also cause considerable harm, including widespread hunger, Sen points out that no famine has 'ever taken place in a functioning democracy.' --- China’s system of one-party, and increasingly one-man, rule is couched in Communist or nationalist jargon, but is rooted in fascist theory. The German jurist Carl Schmitt, who justified Adolf Hitler’s right to wield total power, coined the term “decisionism” to describe a system in which the validity of policies and laws is not determined by their content but by an omnipotent leader’s will. In other words, Hitler’s will was the law."
No More "Chicken Kiev" for Ukraine
by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Anastassia Fedyk, and Ilona Sologoub 
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "On August 1, 1991, a little more than three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to discourage Ukrainians from doing it. In his notorious 'Chicken Kiev' speech in the Ukrainian parliament, Bush lectured the stunned MPs that independence was a recipe for 'suicidal nationalism', 'ethnic hatred', and 'Local despotism.' ----- ....the West’s reluctance to respect Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty was a bad omen, revealing a mindset among US and European leaders that paved the way to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. ----- .... Western observers, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger, blame the West for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, or have urged Western leaders to provide Putin a diplomatic off-ramp by compelling Ukraine to give up territory. Policymakers, too, seem to view Ukraine’s self-defense as a bigger problem than Russia’s genocidal aggression. ----- ..... despite the massive material and military support the West has provided to Ukraine, the fateful logic of appeasement lingers, because many Western leaders fear the consequences of Russia’s defeat more than the prospect of a defeated Ukraine. ----- This war is about the survival of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. In the words of the Israeli leader Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, 'They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.' "
A China Optimist's Lament 
by Stephen S. Roach
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "China’s flexible, blended, increasingly dynamic private sector could do all that and more. ----- Then came Xi Jinping. "
COVID and the Chinese Social Contract 
by Joschka Fischer
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. " ---- "How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves."
Andy Warhol Comes to Kyiv
by Alexander J. Motyl
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Next time you’re in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, don’t bother looking for Dostoevsky Street. It’s been renamed: it’s now Andy Warhol Street. ..... because many Ukrainians regard Andy as Ukrainian. Was he? The evidence is mixed." ---- "Warhol remained a committed Greek Catholic all his life. He regularly prayed, both at home and in church, and frequently attended Sunday Mass. His bedside table contained a crucifix, a Christ statuette, and a prayer book. After he died on February 22, 1987, he was buried in St. John the Divine Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, some twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, in a simple grave next to his parents." ---- "When it comes to objective cultural affiliation or subjective ethnic identification, the United States—with its diverse Slavic heritages—has the greatest claim on Warhol and his art."
New food technologies could release 80% of the world’s farmland back to nature
by Chris D Thomas, Jack Hatfield and Katie Noble
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals. If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products."
Disrupting the Disruptors 
by Roger McNamee
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "After a decade of unconstrained growth – when it seemed that a new billionaire was minted every day – the tech industry has finally hit a rough patch. Elon Musk’s erratic behavior following his takeover of Twitter has left the financially leveraged platform in a precarious state. The crypto exchange FTX’s sudden implosion has vaporized a business that was recently valued at $32 billion, taking many other crypto firms with it. Meta (Facebook) is laying off 11,000 people, 13% of its workforce, and Amazon is shedding 10,000. What are we supposed to make of these setbacks? Are they isolated incidents, or signs of structural change?"
The Unavoidable Crash
by Nouriel Roubini
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200% in 1999 to 350% in 2021. The ratio is now 420% across advanced economies, and 330% in China. In the United States, it is 420%, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II."
Rishi Sunak's Daunting Challenge
by Chris Patten
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "The Conservative leadership must stand up to the party’s extremists, and it must do so sooner rather than later. If moderates cannot defeat the hardliners by the next election, and the outcome turns out to be as bad for the Tories as recent polls suggest, they will find they have the same fight on their hands in opposition. --- Conservatives must never underestimate the importance of their moderate supporters. If the Party continues to disregard centrists whenever the Brexiteer right stamps its feet, it may find itself out of power for a long time to come."
US midterms: why gen Z and millennials came out to vote and why it marks a generational shift
by Dafydd Townley
Nov 24th 2022
EXTRACT: "....young voters did reach the polls they voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates across the country. According to reports, 63% of 18- to 29- year olds voted Democrat and 35% voted Republican in the House of Representatives elections. Voters between 30 and 44 split their vote between the two parties, while older voters tended to vote Republican."
Nouriel Roubini on stagflation, debt distress, financial innovation, and more
by Nouriel Roubini
Nov 24th 2022
Nouriel Roubini: "Central banks are in both a stagflation trap and a debt trap. Amid negative aggregate supply shocks that reduce growth and increase inflation, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they increase interest rates enough to bring inflation down to 2%, they will cause a severe economic hard landing. And if they don’t – attempting instead to protect growth and jobs – they will be left increasingly far behind the curve, leading to a de-anchoring of inflation expectations and a wage-price spiral. Very high debt ratios (both private and public) complicate the dilemma further. Raising interest rates enough to crush inflation causes not only an economic crash, but also a financial crash, with highly leveraged private and public debtors facing severe distress. The resulting financial turmoil that intensifies the recession, creating a vicious cycle of deepening recession and escalating financial pain and debt distress. In these circumstances, central banks will blink. They will wimp out in the fight against inflation, in an effort to avoid an economic and financial crash. But that will lead to a higher permanent inflation rate, while only postponing the arrival of stagflation and debt crises. In other words, central banks in the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies have only bad options."
Disquiet on the Western Front
by Sergei Guriev
Nov 13th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Today’s autocrats wear staid business suits and pretend to be democrats, and that has been sufficient to grant them access to high-level meetings in Davos or at the G20, where they actively recruit former Western politicians, lawyers, public-relations consultants, and think tanks to make their case in the West." ---- "....whatever the weaknesses of Western democracies, they still command a degree of soft power that their autocratic competitors could only dream of. Democracy remains popular around the world – among citizens of both democratic and nondemocratic countries. That is why modern dictators pretend to be democrats." ---- "....there is no shortage of criticism about how the US and Europe function. But that itself is a product of the press freedom and political opposition that one can find only in democracies. But actions speak louder than words: Immigrants from around the world are eager to come to Europe or America, whereas few are trying to get into Russia or China."
Stephen S. Roach on US monetary tightening, China's growth sacrifice, the Sino-American rivalry, and more 
by Stephen S. Roach
Nov 9th 2022
EXTRACT: "In conventional macroeconomics, an economy’s longer-term growth potential is determined by the sum of labor-force and productivity growth. If one of those factors slows, the other must accelerate. Otherwise, long-term growth suffers.  China is in serious trouble on both fronts. An unsustainable one-child family-planning policy –subsequently changed to a two- and now three-child policy – means that the working-age population is declining, and Xi’s speech at the 20th Party Congress suggested that already-strong productivity headwinds are likely to intensify. "
Could Russia collapse?
by Matthew Sussex
Nov 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "First and most obvious – it has happened before. And in an historical sense, it has happened relatively recently, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 rightly considered a seismic event in world politics. The rub is that nobody predicted the end of the USSR either. In fact, it was confidently assumed in the West that Mikhail Gorbachev would go on ruling the Soviet Union, until the hard-line coup that failed to topple him (but left him mortally wounded in a political sense) made that view obviously redundant." ---- "So is it speculative to talk about a future Russian collapse? Yes. Is there evidence it is imminent? No. But in many ways that’s the problem: when authoritarian regimes implode, they tend to do so very quickly, and with little warning."
Xi's Conflict-Prone China 
by Stephen S. Roach
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: " But in celebrating the CPC centennial, he [XI left little doubt of what those challenges might portend: “Having the courage to fight and the fortitude to win is what has made our party invincible.” A modernized and expanded military puts teeth into that threat and underscores the risks posed by Xi’s conflict-prone China."
The ECB Has Been Driving EU Inflation
by Hans-Werner Sinn
Oct 8th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Recent inflation news from the eurozone’s largest member, Germany, is particularly alarming. In August, producer prices – which measure what is happening at the preliminary stages of industrial production – were a whopping 46% higher than in the same month last year. Given the long-term correlation between the growth rate of producer and consumer prices, this suggests that the latter could soar to 14% in November. Price stability – which is supposed to be the ECB’s uncompromising goal, per the Maastricht Treaty – is no longer perceptible" ----- "Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the ECB has allowed the central-bank money supply to increase twice as fast, relative to economic output, as the US Federal Reserve has. Of that growth, 83% was the result of the ECB’s purchases of government bonds from eurozone countries. With those purchases – which totaled an estimated €4.4 trillion – the ECB pushed interest rates on government bonds to around zero. This spurred countries to disregard European debt rules and accumulate debt at a breakneck pace."